Jerome Bruner’s Theory of Education:
From Early Bruner to Later Bruner
KEIICHI TAKAYA
Tokyo Women’s Medical University
ABSTRACT: Though a psychologist by training, Jerome Bruner
has always been, and still is, one of the leading figures in
education. His theory of education in the 1960s and the 1970s
directly influenced the programs of education formulated during
those decades. The influence of his theory after the 1980s seems to
be less direct, and some who read his 1996 book, The Culture of
Education, may have an impression that his educational theory
has changed. In this paper, I will review the historical significance
of the changes in Jerome Bruner’s work over his career and their
implications for curriculum theory. I will argue that there are, in
fact, significant changes in Bruner’s views.
KEYWORDS: Jerome Bruner, curriculum theory, culture, culture
as context, culture of education, structure of discipline,
understanding, spiral curriculum, discovery learning, narrative.
Introduction
In this paper, I will review the historical significance of the changes in
Jerome Bruner’s work over his career and their implications for
curriculum theory. Though a psychologist by training, Jerome Bruner
has always been, and still is, one of the leading figures in education. His
theory of education in the 1960s and 1970s (characteristically seen in
The Process of Education, 1960/1977), directly influenced the programs
of education formulated during those decades.1 The influence of his
theory after the 1980s seems to be less direct, and some who read his
1996 book, The Culture of Education, may have an impression that his
educational theory has changed.
I will argue that there are, in fact, significant changes in Bruner’s
views. The key to understanding the changes in Bruner’s theory is his
concept of culture. In short, his earlier view implied a logic of cultural
transmission. Culture represented educational content to be transmitted
to the student, and the primary issues for curriculum theory were to
locate the most valuable part of culture that would enhance individuals’
cognitive capacity and to work out an effective way of communicating
Interchange, Vol. 39/1, 1–19, 2008.
DOI: 10.1007/s10780-008-9039-2
© Springer 2008
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the content to students. On the other hand, his recent view emphasizes
the importance of understanding culture as context in which values and
meanings of students’ experience may be interpreted. So, his primary
concerns are to help students experience various modes of meaningmaking and communicating and to create a community in which
multiple ways of learning take place as opposed to the largely
cultureless mode of learning which dominates schools.
The kind of psychology that conceives of learning as essentially an
individual process in which the individual’s mind acquires neutral and
objective knowledge is the major cause of cultureless learning. He has
always tried to overcome this classical epistemological position since the
earliest stages of his career, but it did not have strong practical
implications when he was enormously popular among those who were
concerned about the state of the curriculum. His earlier view attracted
attention from both lay and academic persons and was used as a
principle of curriculum reform from the 1950s to the 1970s. His recent
view does not seem to provide educators as straightforward a guideline
for curriculum development as his earlier view did; rather, it provides
us with perspectives to understand and assess the characteristics of the
education we have today.
The Concept of Culture
From the early stages of his career, Bruner has been interested in the
notion of culture; how culture shapes the mind. In fact, his
dissatisfaction with existing psychological theories’ inadequacy to deal
with the way culture shapes the human mind motivated him for the
research on the human mind that involves not only psychology but also
philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and so on. He wrote, “though it is
obvious to say that the child is born into a culture and formed by it, it
is not plain how a psychological theory of cognitive development deals
with this fact” (1966, p. 6).
Bruner describes that “culture” – being aware that culture is not a
simple entity but a phenomenon that consists of various layers of
cultures and subcultures – denotes an environment in which we live,
and it embodies “a set of values, skills, and ways of life.” He also says
that “culture” is the “toolkit” for sense-making and communicating
(1996, p. 3); as such, it enhances our (presumably) natural endowment
in action, perception, sense-making, and thought (1966, p. 126; cf. also,
1971, p. 53). An example of the toolkit is the language that is commonly
used in a particular cultural tradition; it includes not only grammar and
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
3
vocabulary but also such things as knowledge, beliefs, and values shared
by the people of the culture (e.g., interpretive procedures in sensemaking and communicating; cf. 1996, pp. 86, 95).
Culture is the context in which individual members make sense of
and appraise incidents and phenomena. As such, it is a constraint on
endeavors of the individual mind; just like our native language imposes
a certain limit on the way we think and communicate. On the other
hand, culture does not lack resources for the individual to transcend to
some extent the limits imposed either by the presumable human native
endowment or by the culture itself; for example, people who are good at
using various modes of linguistic expression seem to be much less
constrained by the syntactical structure of the language (Bruner, 1996,
p. 18).
To Bruner’s eyes, the dominant scheme of education looks as if it
assumes that learning could escape culture-embeddedness. Bruner
therefore criticizes:
1) What he calls the “computational” view of the human mind. The
view that underlies the theories of mind from classical empiricism
to behaviorism; it regards the human mind as tabula rasa and the
process of learning as a matter of how unambiguous facts can be
sorted, stored, and retrieved by the human mind;
2) The view that conceives of facts, values, and meanings as fixed and
indifferent to cultural context and human perspectives;
transparency of language and neutrality of knowledge;
3) The view that regards the process of learning as one-directional, and
hence, overlooks our talent for “intersubjectivity.” The Western
tradition of education tends to regard learning as a process in which
“a single, presumably omnipresent teacher explicitly tells or shows
presumably unknowing learners something they presumably know
nothing about” (p. 20). The Western tradition tends to overrate the
explicitness of communication; communication is seen as analogous
to the passing on of things from one hand to another, and the
communicability of explicit linguistic expression tends to be
privileged (1996, Ch. l).
Bruner tries to supercede the principles and practices of education that
are premised on these views. So he proposes a cultural view (as opposed
to the computational view). He says that nothing is “culture free” but
also that individuals are not mere mirrors of their culture (1996, p. 14).
While individuals’ construal of meaning or judgments are subject to
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KEIICHI TAKAYA
canons and standards of a particular culture, cultural values are not
univocal (p. 14).
Individuals are not mere receptacles of facts, nor is culture a mere
collection of unambiguous and immutable facts; individuals construct
meanings and culture is always in the process of change. Education is
a process of negotiation between the individual and culture. Education
as an institution presents useful knowledge, visions of worthwhile life,
and so forth, in a somewhat consolidated form, but it does not mean that
it necessarily sets a definite limit upon the meanings and values which
individuals construct; culture is also a resource for individuals to
conduct a well-adapted life in the culture and, if necessary, for
transcending it, at least to some extent.
He seems to have been consistent since the earlier times about the
cultural nature of the human mind and activities. The question for those
who are interested in the historical significance of his theory is whether
his earlier views might have failed to put forth these views, especially
when they were translated into practical application; or whether he
might have provided, though perhaps unintentionally, some ideas that
would support the views he tried to challenge.
From Early Bruner to Later Bruner
In this section, I will show in some detail that the logic of Bruner’s
earlier view (roughly up to the 1970s) was that of cultural transmission.
It is true that Bruner critiqued, since the earliest stage of his career,
some theories (psychological or otherwise) that seemed to him to imply
cultural transmission as a crucial mission of schools. For example, he
criticized John Dewey for promising cultural transcendence but failing
to provide appropriate means for it. However, when we consider the
context in which his particular ideas should be placed, it becomes clear
that his earlier view provides language that would support rather
conventional views of curriculum and teaching which are shared, for
example, by Franklin Bobbitt and Ralph Tyler.
Bruner, Dewey, and Progressive Education
Those decades in which Bruner was involved in educational reform were
marked by the fact that America was in urgent need of improving its
schools and curriculum, most notably caused by the Sputnik shock of
1957.2 As a result of this incident, America was made to realize that it
was lagging behind the Soviet Union in preparing scientists, and also
citizens who were well educated in such areas as science and math, from
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
5
whom future intellectual leaders would emerge. The blame was largely
placed on the inadequate educational principles and practice based on
progressive experiential education whose theoretical origin was John
Dewey’s philosophy of education.
Although Bruner shares Dewey’s criticism against a mechanistic
view of the human mind, he criticizes the so-called experience-based
education which was too often associated with the name of Dewey.
Bruner thought:
(1) Human beings become what they are only by internalizing culture,3
but this acquisition of culture happens by learning the essences (or
the toolkit) of culture which are encapsulated in each subject or
academic discipline taught in school (though Bruner was not
satisfied with the existing curriculum);4
(2) The principles and logic of the so-called experience-based education
were inadequate. Particularly problematic were the assumptions (a)
that the educational program could motivate children for learning
if the activities and subjects in school were connected to or based on
the daily experience which children have outside school, and (b) that
experience-based education could expand children’s perspectives
beyond their familiar ones.
In the 1980s, his commentary on Dewey almost disappears from his
books, but it seems that he had Dewey in mind when he was vigorously
writing about the importance of educational reform in the 1960s and
1970s. This is apparent in his small essay, “After John Dewey, What?”
(in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, Bruner, 1962/1979). This
essay was written as a criticism of Dewey’s view of education based on
Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed” (Dewey, 1897/1975). Since it was not
based on Democracy and Education (1916/1985) or a few other works
which show a maturer view of Dewey and are more typically referred to
as his major works of education, it might not be entirely fair to Dewey,
but these two papers show good contrast between the two.
Bruner seems to be in agreement with Dewey’s point, “all education
proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social
consciousness of the race” (Dewey, 1897/1975, “My Pedagogic Creed,”
Article I, p. 116), but he also says that this view, if developed as in
Dewey’s theory, has a possible defect or a limit in scope. Bruner wrote
right after the quote above:
But education must also seek to develop the process of intelligence
so that the individual is capable of going beyond the cultural ways
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of his social world, able to innovate in however modest a way so
that he can create an interior culture of his own. (p. 116)
A key feature of Dewey’s way of interpreting and constructing education
that “proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social
consciousness of the race” was to connect experiences outside and inside
school, and Bruner thought that it may very well hinder the full
development of the individual, particularly the development of the
capacity to “go beyond the cultural ways of his social world.” Bruner
thought that this would undermine Dewey’s point about education as
continual growth. Bruner wrote:
But education, by giving shape and expression to our experience,
can also be the principal instrument for setting limits on the
enterprise of mind. The guarantee against limits is the sense of
alternatives. Education must, then, be not only a process that
transmits culture, but also one that provides alternative views of
the world and strengthens the will to explore them. (1962/1979, p.
117) 5
Conceived in this way, the view about knowledge and knowledge
acquisition in Dewey’s philosophy (and also in progressivism) is
inadequate. Bruner describes the consequence of such Deweyan
progressive view in the following way:
A generation ago, the progressive movement urged that knowledge
be related to the child’s own experience and brought out of the
realm of empty abstractions. A good idea was translated into
banalities about the home, then the friendly postman and
trashman, then the community. It is a poor way to compete with
the child’s own dramas and mysteries. (1966, p. 63)
In contrast to this, Bruner thinks that:
The unity of knowledge is to be found within knowledge itself, if
the knowledge is worth mastering. To attempt a justification of
subject matter, as Dewey did, in terms of its relation to the child’s
social activities is to misunderstand what knowledge is and how it
may be mastered. (1962/1979, pp. 120-121)
So, the goal of education, in Bruner’s terms, becomes “disciplined
understanding” ( p. 122).6 By emphasizing understanding, rather than
performance, he means that it is not sufficient to have information (in
the sense that it is simply displayed in multiple-choice or short-answer
questions); information or knowledge must be structured so that the
individual can (a) expand and deepen his or her knowledge more
efficiently, and (b) go beyond what is simply given. As a method to
achieve this goal, Bruner proposes his famous spiral curriculum and
discovery learning.7
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
7
The “Structure of Discipline” and “Discovery Learning”
Bruner seemed to think that the academic disciplines or topics have a
tendency to arouse curiosity in human beings in general, including
children. When he said, “interest can be created and stimulated,”
(1962/1979, p. 117), he means that academic subjects have intrinsic
attraction, and that they do not always have to be related to children’s
daily experience in order for children to be interested in learning.8 So he
says that “intellectual activity anywhere is the same, whether at the
frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom” (1960/1977, p. 14).
Thus, educators need not make subjects or topics more accessible or
palatable by presenting them in real-life settings of children’s daily
experience.
Instead, subjects and topics must be presented according to the
structures of the academic disciplines which are the essence and
reflection of accumulated human curiosity.9 A child, for example in
learning history, in this scheme, must be treated as a historian
inquiring into the issues and problems of history. Referring to his
famous proposition, “any subject can be taught to anybody at any stage
in some form that is honest” (1962/1979, p. 108) may help us understand
his belief.10
As I wrote at the beginning of this paper, Bruner thought that
individuals become what they are only by learning the essence of the
culture in which they live, and this essence of culture has a potency to
intrinsically motivate children. He thought that the structure of a
discipline would facilitate the learning process; and that discovery
learning and spiral curriculum would allow students to be active
participants of their own leaning, and hence, would make lessons
meaningful. Bruner thought highly of participatory methods or models
of learning, rather than the mere receiving of information, knowledge,
or skill. So he emphasizes that a child learns, for example history, as a
historian does. He wrote, “there is no difference in kind between the
man at the frontier and the young student at his own frontier, each
attempting to understand. Let the educational process be life itself as
fully as we can make it” (1962/1979, p. 126). And the virtues of this sort
of learning are twofold:
The virtues of encouraging discovery are of two kinds. In the first
place, the child will make what he learns his own, will fit his
discovery into the interior world of culture that he creates for
himself. Equally important, discovery and the sense of confidence
it provides is the proper reward for learning. It is a reward that,
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moreover, strengthens the very process that is at the heart of
education – disciplined inquiry. (pp. 123-124)
Bruner wrote, “no person is master of the whole culture” (1962/1979, p.
116). I would draw from this that the issue about the structure of
knowledge was mainly about the cognitive capacity (or its limit) of the
individual. He explains about the structure as follows: “Grasping the
structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many
other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in
short, is to learn how things are related” (1960/1977, p. 7). Grasping the
structure of a discipline would (a) simplify information, (b) generate new
propositions, and (c) increase the manipulability of a body of knowledge
(1966, p. 41). There is a point made about generating the new
propositions, which may lead an individual to new discovery or
creativity or going beyond something given, but the most important
point about the structure seems to be the efficiency in learning and
coping with a vast amount of information in contemporary society.11
(Probably this emphasis comes from the context of American education
in the 1960s.) So, Bruner, in those books in which he often mentioned
the concept of structure (from Process in 1960 to Relevance in 1971),
suggested that the urgent task for education was to prepare “a welleducated citizenry” (1960/1977, p. 1). He also uses such words as
excellence and disciplined understanding; what he had in mind at that
time was: “One thing seems clear: if all students are helped to the full
utilization of their intellectual powers, we will have a better chance of
surviving as a democracy in an age of enormous technological and social
complexity” (p. 10).
A point that deserves our attention is his idea of intuitive thinking
or intuition (see Bruner’s books from Process, 1960/1977, to Relevance,
1971). While intuition has a rather complicated history in the history of
ideas, it means, in the context of Bruner’s ideas, a leap of thought
unbound by step-by-step, careful and informed thinking; it means, in
short, guessing (1960/1977, p. 64) or hunch (1971, p. 85) and Bruner
encouraged students to use it. This was a very unconventional thing to
say, at least in the mid 20th century, to describe a valued procedure in
education. He observed that in school, a totally different and unnatural
mode of thinking is imposed upon children, that is, the kind of thinking
that needs to be clear, distinct, informed, and explicit from the
beginning, and it turns children off from engaging in thought. So he
wants to encourage children to engage in serious thought by saying that
it needs not be accurate or correct from the beginning.
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
9
He says that intuition “is less rigorous with respect to proof, more
visual or iconic, more oriented to the whole problem than to particular
parts, less verbalized with respect to justification, and based upon a
confidence in one’s ability to operate with insufficient data” (1971, p.
82). By intuitive thinking, one grasps “the meaning or significance of
structure of a problem without explicit reliance upon the analytic
apparatus of one’s craft” (1962/1979, p. 102). Just like Dewey’s
“suggestion” and “verification” in his idea of “reflective thought”
(1933/1986), Bruner proposes that intuitive thinking should be coupled
with “analytic thinking.” What we can draw from these points is that
the purposes of using intuition are, first, ultimately to grasp the
structure, and second, to nurture confidence in children.
However, the problem is that when the encouragement of thought
is placed in the general context of assisting children to understand the
structure of disciplines, his ideas would look rather conventional and
conservative, because the ultimate purpose is the acquisition of the
structure of discipline and the process toward it can be arranged
entirely on an individual basis. While his acknowledgment of the
intuitive aspect of thought is rather new, the overall learning theory
does not really deviate from the dominant view that conceives of
learning as a process in which the individual mind acquires an
indifferent flow of information.
Epistemology
We notice in the remarks above (1962/1979, pp. 123-124) Bruner’s
assumption about learning is basically an individual business (“make
what he learns his own,” “interior culture of his own”). Nevertheless, we
cannot but notice, particularly in his interest in Vygotsky’s work
(1934/1992), his orientation toward the construction of the human mind
via interaction with other human beings and culture. For example, in
the 1962/1979 preface to On Knowing, he wrote that “interior
intellectual work is almost always a continuation of a dialogue.”
Bruner’s conception of understanding also includes what may be
called a meta-cognition: a capacity to understand not only particular
content but also the psychological or intellectual processes and
strategies one uses in acquiring the content. He asks, “What do we
mean by an educated man [person]?” and answers that, though an
educated person does not necessarily need the most sophisticated, latest
knowledge in all areas, she or he should know (a) the level of his [or her]
own knowledge, and (b) how to acquire knowledge (1962/1979, p. 109).12
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He has always appreciated the significance of “meta”-cognition, that
is, being conscious of how one’s own mind works in knowing, thinking,
and learning. Or, put slightly differently, being able to look at oneself
(one’s knowledge, thought, and cultural values) from another’s point of
view. For example, he explains discovery learning in the following way:
“Discovery teaching generally involves not so much the process of
leading students to discover what is ‘out there,’ but rather, their
discovering what is in their own heads” (Bruner, 1971, p. 72).
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Bruner favored such concepts as
structure, discovery, and intuitive thinking – after the 1980s, he used
such concepts as culture, meaning-making, narrative, and intersubjectivity much more often. The change in his favored concepts seems
to come from his epistemological changes; he now seems to dispense
with the clear-cut separation between individuals and culture which we
find in his earlier writings. Consequently, he seems to be less concerned
with the idea of education as an individualized process, and that of
learning as an exclusively individual achievement.
In The Culture of Education (1996), Bruner reflects on the way he
thought three decades ago. “It now seems to me in retrospect, some
three decades later, that I was then much too preoccupied with solo,
intrapsychic processes of knowing and how these might be assisted by
appropriate pedagogies” (Preface, p, xi). Also he said, looking back on
the Head Start Program, that the conception of “deprivation” was based
on the notion of the mind as tabula rasa (p. 80).
So, how do these changes affect his educational theory? I think that
an example can be seen in the following remark in Culture; “Now, school
is a culture itself, not just a ‘preparation’ for it, a warming up” (1996, p.
98).
Along with his point about the departure from “solo” psychology, a
departure from “preparation” seems significant. We have to examine
two points about his earlier view.
Bruner was, from the early stages of his career, influenced most
notably by Vygotsky, and was interested in the way culture shapes the
human mind. This has been consistent from the time he emphasized
such concepts as structure though he was, at that time, more concerned
with (a) what individuals acquired, or what they become able to do, as
a result of education; and (b) the objective nature of the structure of
knowledge. His shift of focus from individual to communal (or, his
departure from “solo”), and from objective/subjective to “intersubjective”
can be seen in some of his works even in the 1970s. For example, he
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
11
wrote, “man’s intellect then is not simply his own, but is communal in
the sense that its unlocking or empowering depends upon the success of
the culture in developing means to that end” [italics added] (1971, p. 7).
He said that though essentialism or realism, in which the self is
thought of as something like substance or essence, was dominant in
psychology, alternative views of the self had already existed in other
areas such as cultural anthropology and philosophy.13 According to one
such alternative viewpoint, a “proper person is better conceived ... not
as the pure and enduring nucleus but [as] the sum and swarm of
participations” (1990, p. 107). Bruner, in psychology and education,
introduced this conception of relation (or mutual dependency) between
the human mind (or the self) and the culture. His departure from his
earlier “solo” orientation became apparent in the 1980s and 1990s. He
wrote, “it is man’s participation in culture and the realization of his
mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a
human psychology on the basis of the individual alone” (p. 12). He also
said, “to treat the world as an indifferent flow of information to be
processed by individuals each on his or her own terms is to lose sight of
how individuals are formed and how they function” (p. 12).
Bruner’s critical view of solo-epistemology was not sophisticated or
forceful enough in the early years, and the temperament surrounding
education (whether in terms of theory or of public concern) was not
ready for it. In any case it did not catch educators’ attention in those
decades; whatever Bruner’s intention might have been, his emphasis on
such things as “the structure of the discipline” and “discovery” did not
force people to give up the epistemological position that would treat the
world as an indifferent flow of information. His ideas, on the one hand,
allowed people to feel that they did not have to give up the legacy of
progressivism which treasures spontaneity, excitement, and joy of
childhood in the process of education (because of Bruner’s emphasis on
active participation in learning), while, on the other hand, assured them
that academic excellence by the acquisition of solid content is
sustainable and that America did not have to lag behind the Soviet
Union (because of Bruner’s emphasis on the structure of discipline).
Now, Bruner’s concern seems to have changed from implementation
of his ideas to the elaboration of his psychological and epistemological
research. He sets aside his concern with the educational implication of
his research or view, and examines more carefully the nature of the
emergence and development of the human mind.
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The educational practice we see around us today does not seem to
reflect this epistemological change yet, Bruner is not the only one who
thinks this shift important. The success and failure of schooling is still
measured primarily by the acquisition of prescribed content. We are yet
to see a definitive form of implementing the view that emphasizes
“intersubjectivity” and “narratives.” However, we may notice in the field
of curriculum theory the kind of shift which Bruner is talking about. An
example may be the concept of curriculum itself; it is no longer
preoccupied with the importance or possibility of setting the goal
(objective), and deducing from it appropriate contents and processes to
achieve it (the Tylerian notion of curriculum). Now, some people
conceive that curriculum denotes how each person experiences the
educational process; this is typically seen in such an idea as curerre,
which is “a method and theory of curriculum which escapes the
epistemological traps of mainstream social science and educational
research. Currere focuses on the educational experience of the individual
as reported by the individual” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman,
2000, p. 414). This new notion, in turn, encourages us to re-examine the
relation between psychology and education; a critical viewpoint which
Bruner was among the first to take.
The Scientific Rigor of Education
Bruner’s increasing emphasis on narrative, culture, and
intersubjectivity reflects a change in a larger philosophical and
theoretical context.
One of the consequences of his changes is the relation between
psychology and education; or to put it a bit differently, we may say that
the idea of science as the foundation of educational theory and practice
is called into question. In short, his message to the educators who look
to psychologists or scientists for practical guidance of curriculum and
teaching is this; the 19th century conception of rigor in education is over
and they are no longer authorities to be counted on for practical
principles of curriculum development or teaching methods. This does
not mean that educational studies are less rigorous than natural
sciences, but means that their rigor should be of different nature.
Psychology used to be expected to supply effective means to the ends
that were identified by such disciplines as ethics (Herbert) and sociology
(Durkheim), and Bruner’s earlier theory fits in this scheme (cf. 1966, p.
23). The assumption was that psychology, by virtue of its capacity to
identify the law of development of the mind, could tell educators what
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
13
content was suitable for children of certain developmental stages and
what the arrangement of presentation of the content should be in order
to maximize learning. Thus, from Herbert and Durkheim in the 19th
century to Piaget and early Bruner in the 20th century, psychology was
prescriptive. However, Bruner now seemed to believe that there were
problems in that understanding of what psychology can and should do.
Bruner now says that the process of teaching and learning is a
matter of communication that is not quite accommodating to the
traditional universalistic or scientific view. In the traditional
framework, learning was understood as the relation between the
student’s mind and the object of knowledge (1996, p. 178). On the other
hand, in the recent view of Bruner, it is crucial to understand the
process of learning as a process of communication.
Therefore, learning is no longer seen as merely a matter of the
mastery of the content; it is a set of phenomena that occurs around the
mastery of the content. Learning should be understood as an inherently
communicative process, and educational theories which are intended for
practical application must take this into account. Bruner has
consistently argued that culture shapes the mind, but early Bruner’s
emphasis was on the problem of what content or toolkit shapes the mind
in the most functional way, and this problem setting induced the
attempt for efficient ways of communicating a given content to the
student. On the other hand, he is now more interested in describing and
analyzing what is taking place in the minds of those who are involved
in the learning process when the attempt for teaching and learning is
made. One of the points he makes is that learners are constructing their
psychological theories, so to speak, as well as constructing world-views
when they engage in educational activities.
For example, following Bruner, I may distinguish three levels of
learning. When children are involved in a typical classroom interaction
that includes the learner, the teacher, and the content, at least three
levels or layers of learning experience is taking place in the mind of the
learner (cf. 1996, pp. 57-58).
The first level is obviously the mastery of what passes as valuable
knowledge and skills in the learner’s own culture or society.
The second level is to understand how to comprehend other people’s
beliefs, intentions, and desires. At a very superficial level, all teachers
know that students look in teachers’ remarks for useful tips for good
scores and grades, or they read in teachers’ tone, expression, gesture,
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and so forth, lots of messages by which they learn how people and
society operate and what they are expected to do or not do.
The third level is that students come to understand, through
communication with teachers and other students, the characteristics of
their own learning, remembering, thinking, and guessing.
Educators used to conceptualize learning only at the first level, but
Bruner includes the second and the third level, which he calls the
“meta” cognition (cf. 1996, pp. 18-19, for his belief in the importance of
meta-cognition). This perspective requires us to examine the way we
understand what takes place in the classroom.
Consequences of Bruner’s View
The principles that dominate our schooling are highly de-personalized
and cultureless. For example, the language of accountability holds a
view of education as a matter of how faithfully individual students
acquire or copy prescribed contents; the other side of this coin is a pair
of assumptions that valuable content is prescribable apart from the
context in which individual teachers and students live, and that it is
desirable so to prescribe content. I do not think that many teachers hold
this as an ideal picture, or even an accurate picture, of what is going on
in the classroom. However, the problem is that teachers are considered
doing well when they, almost as mere technicians, pass the prescribed
content on to students. This is why such things as multi-media
presentations of the content which more efficiently ensure that students
memorize it are deemed comparable with, or potentially can replace,
human teachers. Bruner’s early view had very little that would
challenge this notion of learning.
For another example, I wonder what significance students get when
they pass through segments of learning, grades, and stages of schooling.
Bruner refers to Ignace Meyerson’s idea of “works” (oeuvres), which
means the externalized product of cultural activity, experience, and
processes. The “works” could mean in a grand scale the arts and
sciences of a culture, but in the context of learning, it could also mean
the product of the learning process that gives “pride, identity, and a
sense of continuity to those who participate” (1996, p. 22). Accepting
Bruner’s ideas, one would have to conclude that our schools are
cultureless and de-personalized because they lack this sense of
significance of, and attachment to, what one has experienced through
the process of learning.
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
15
Bruner points out the importance of creating a sense of self, in all
human experience and in school particularly. He then says that in order
to have a sense of self, two aspects are crucial. First is to have a sense
of “agency,” that is, to have “a sense that one can initiate and carry out
activities on one’s own.” Second, but more importantly, he says:
What characterizes human selfhood is the construction of a
conceptual system that organizes, as it were, a “record” of agentive
encounters with the world, a record that is related to the past (that
is, “autobiographical memory,” so-called) but that is also
extrapolated into the future-self with history and with possibility.
It is a “possible self” that regulates aspiration, confidence,
optimism, and their opposites. (1996, p. 36)
My observation is that these conditions for having selfhood are missing
in schools in many cases. Students do learn things when they find
significance in these things (lessons and activities) to their lives. In such
a case they even engage in drills and memorization just like a boy who
wants to be tomorrow’s Michael Jordan would shoot a ball to the basket
thousands of times. The problem of our schools, on the other hand, is
that drills and memorizations are imposed on students in such a way
that students cannot understand the context or significance of these
activities.
The point of view which Bruner has reached is shared by others as
well. Nowhere else than in curriculum studies is this tendency clearer;
for example, in the work of the so-called reconceptualists such as
William Piner and Madeleine Grumet who speak of the idea of currere.
This is not a coherent or systematic movement, but it is a reaction
against the Tylerian notion of curriculum and conceives of it from such
an alternative, phenomenological perspective.
Neither Bruner nor the reconceptualists seem clear as to what
comes next (1996, p. 22); they are certain that educational and
curriculum studies should de-emphasize traditional notions of what
counts as learning, but we are not quite clear what their new curricular
principles may look like in an operationally meaningful sense. However,
Bruner does make a few suggestions.
First, in The Culture of Education Bruner writes that education
tends to work well when learning is, first, participatory, provocative,
communal, and collaborative; and second, when learning is a process of
constructing meaning rather than receiving (1996, p. 84). This is not to
recommend that we should discard the memorization of facts, but to
recommend that we should examine to what effect facts are acquired, for
example. In another place he suggests that the ultimate end of pursuing
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KEIICHI TAKAYA
knowledge is to develop curiosity (Bruner, 1983, pp. 62-63), and
ironically, he sounds like Dewey, whom he criticized earlier. Since
learning involves much more than the mere passing on of the content
from one person to another, it makes less sense to suppose that
involvement of first-rate scholars would solve the problem. The process
of developing a curriculum, for example, needs to become an engaging
conversation that involves teachers as well as academics. Thus, the
ideas of enforcing a curriculum on a large scale and of holding teachers
accountable to inculcating the prescribed content make less sense.
Individual teachers or teams of teachers should create their own local
curricula by using such things as a state or district- wide curriculum as
a reference.
Second, he suggests that the role of the teacher, rather than the
system, will become more important (Bruner, 1996, p. 85). Thus, the
system, for example a formal curriculum, becomes less important
compared to the role of the teacher, and the actual activities and
interactions which take place in the classroom. He wrote:
The means for aiding and abetting a learner is sometimes called a
“curriculum,” and what we have learned is that there is no such
thing as the curriculum. For in effect, a curriculum is like an
animated conversation on a topic that can never be fully defined,
although one can set limits upon it. (1996, pp. 115-116)
Curriculum used to be, and still is, thought of as a course to run (from
its etymological origin), in which the goal is set, and all that individual
runners (learners) are supposed to do is to reach the goal by following
the fixed route.
Bruner’s current notion of the curriculum as “an animated
conversation” does not seem to fit well with the old notion of education
and curriculum.
It does not seem plausible to me that we can create an entirely
different yet effective or meaningful curriculum based on Bruner’s
theory today. Even if we try to make one, I wonder how different it could
be from the one based on his earlier theory. (We should note that
Bruner writes that his basic belief about education has not changed over
the years; see Culture, 1996, p. 39). The point at issue is which of the
changes Bruner went through addresses the way we should see the
curriculum or how we may make use of it, not the content or structure
of the curriculum itself. Now the problem (or emphasis) is not whether
“the scholars at the forefront” or “first-rank scholars” are involved in
making the best curriculum, but (our reflection upon) how the
curriculum can be used to bring about an “animated conversation” in
JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
17
the classroom (1996, p. 115), and what kind of communicative
experience is likely to follow from the way a curriculum or lesson plan
is organized.
NOTES
1. For example, Head Start, “discovery learning,” and the “structure of the
discipline movement.” Bruner’s influences are seen also in England (e.g.,
Plowden Report, 1967) and in Japan (the structure of the curriculum
movement in the 1960s and 1970s).
2. Cf. “a long-range crisis in national security, a crisis whose resolution will
depend upon a well-educated citizenry” (1960/1977, p. 1).
3. This is very Vygotskian. We should remember that he was among the
first scholars who introduced and appreciated the value of the works of Lev
Vygotsky (and A. Luria). He wrote the introduction to Vygotsky’s Thought
and Language in 1962 (1934/1992). Bruner writes that he encountered
Vygotsky’s works in the late 1940s (1983, p. 139), and that Jean Piaget and
Vygotsky were the two figures who made him realize the fascination in
studying the development of the human mind (p. 136). As to the difference
between Piaget and Vygotsky, and the attractiveness of Vygotsky over
Piaget, Bruner describes in Culture (1996) as follows: “I recall particularly
visits with Alexander Luria, that enthusiastic exponent of Lev Vygotsky’s
“cultural historical” theories of development. His ebullient espousal of the
role of language and culture in the functioning of mind soon undermined
my confidence in the more self-contained, formalistic theories of the
towering Jean Piaget, theories that had very little room for the enabling
role of culture in mental development” (Preface, p. xiii).
4. See for example, his “Man, A Course of Study” (1966), in Toward a
Theory of Instruction.
5. Cf. also, Relevance, 1971, p. 102.
6. Also “Excellence” (Process, 1960/1977, pp. 9, 70; On Knowing, 1962/1979,
p. 119), that is, “optimum intellectual development” (1960/1977, p. 9).
7. For Bruner, knowledge is not a mere collection of information. He writes,
“knowledge is a model we construct to give meaning and structure to
regularities in experience. The organizing ideas of any body of knowledge
are inventions for rendering experience economical and connected” (On
Knowing, 1962/1979, p. 120).
8. Bruner believed that “cognitive or intellectual mastering is rewarding”
(1966, p. 30).
9. “In a word, the best introduction to a subject is the subject itself” (1966,
p. 155; 1971, p. 60).
10. This proposition has several variations, but the one that I quoted seems
closest to what Bruner wants to say. In Process, 1960/1977, Bruner wrote,
“the foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in
some form” (p. 12), and “any subject can be taught effectively in some
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KEIICHI TAKAYA
intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (p. 33);
in Relevance, 1971, “any subject can be taught to anybody at any stage in
some form that is both interesting and honest” (p. 18). Words such as
“effective,” “honest,” and “interesting” have been added and eliminated, but
his major point seems to be in the word “honest” which means intellectual
honesty. Cf. On Knowing, 1962/1979, p. 124 where he explains what he
means by “honest.”
11. Cf. in Process, 1960/1977, he writes, “the main objective of this work
has been to present subject matter effectively – that is, with due regard not
only for coverage but also for structure” [italics added] (p. 2). It is
interesting to note that Theodore Brameld (1971) categorized Bruner’s
theory as basically “essentialism” which takes “education as cultural
transmission,” rather than, for example, “progressivism.” We should also
note that this evaluation was done in 1971. Brameld’s categorization is
based on Bruner’s emphasis on the “structure” of knowledge, “excellence”
and “disciplined understanding,” which imply the importance of the
acquisition of a pre-determined knowledge. He writes, “however insightfully
he [Bruner] at times supplements progressivist concepts such as reflective
thinking, one may wonder, in fact, whether he does not actually invite
regression rather than progression in his interpretation of knowledge and
knowing” (p. 234).
I agree with this interpretation. Whatever his intention was, Bruner’s
argument in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to imply that the process of
learning was a process of acquiring knowledge that existed in culture
independent of the individual’s use or interpretation of it.
12. “I think that, at the very least, an educated man should have a sense
of what knowledge is like in some field of inquiry, to know it in its
connectedness and with a feeling for how the knowledge is gained. An
educated man must not be dazzled by the myth that advanced knowledge
is the result of wizardry. The way to battle this myth is in the direct
experience of the learner – to give him the experience of going from a
primitive and weak grasp of some subject to a stage in which he has a more
refined and powerful grasp of it. I do not mean that each man should be
carried to the frontiers of knowledge, but I do mean that it is possible to
take him far enough so that he himself can see how far he has come and by
what means” ( Bruner, 1962/1979, p. 109).
13. See Relevance, 1971, p. 21, where he mentions F. Boas (1938), M. Mead
(1946), and B.L. Whorf (1956).
REFERENCES
Brameld, T. (1971). Patterns of educational philosophy: Divergence and
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JEROME BRUNER’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
19
Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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TITLE: Jerome Bruner’s Theory of Education: From Early
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SOURCE: Interchange 39 no1 Ja 2008
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